The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Nikita Khrushchev's Vulgar Marxism I WISH THAT Thomas Jefferson could have been here to engage in conversation with Nikita Khrushchev. Or Abraham Lincoln, who...
...But sitting in the seats of the mighty, it is easy for them to assume the possession of learning and to lecture a great nation on the course of history...
...But for the Russians, at least for many of them, his cosmography has one great advantage...
...Often I have read the same arguments in the Daily Worker...
...But last week it was retailed to hundreds of newspapermen and representatives of radio and television...
...I have no complaint to make against our newsmen, who carried the chief burden of our defense...
...It is a veritable picture of heaven...
...And —oh happy day!—it is decreed in the stars that nothing shall take its place but Communism...
...In the Middle Ages, he patiently explained, we had feudalism...
...Our politicians promise prosperity for the coming Administration...
...The very crudest Marxists sit in the Kremlin...
...Or Abraham Lincoln, who would have been able to put up an interesting argument against our distinguished visitor...
...But, the plump Prime Minister carefully explained to his hundreds of American journalists, there is one sure hope for the slaves of capitalism...
...The theories of Marx, as they have become simplified in the Communist version, have taken on a fairytale quality...
...Many years ago, open-air orators on the streets of New York and Chicago used to go through these same tricks of logic...
...Capitalism, too, will come to an end...
...A certain point was passed...
...They backed the biggest Bolshevik straight up against the worst things in his record and asked him how come...
...We should have had at least one professor of history at those press conferences—or one clear-headed philosopher...
...And the trade union leaders in particular were sharp and clear and ruthlessly intelligent...
...The later one was individualistic, but it allowed the rich to exploit the poor to such an extent that it was practically a system of slavery...
...He turned every banquet hall or cocktail lounge into a classroom...
...But luck would have it that the most unlearned leaders were the ones who achieved power...
...History, he implied, is automatic...
...The Communists foretell everything good for hundreds or thousands of years...
...During the trials of the Communists on Foley Square, the juries were often given this precious lesson in history and economics...
...It holds out the promise of great prosperity and happiness...
...Production will be speeded up...
...Only the ruthless dictators went on to positions of power...
...But on the average we stand up pretty well...
...The automatic rotation which put an end to feudalism is still in operation...
...The various Socialist groups which existed in Russia before the Revolution contained some of the most distinguished scholars in the world...
...This cruel and ruthless individualistic system will just shrivel up and pass away...
...Knowing how to seize and wield power, they need no other sort of knowledge...
...The theoretical basis of our industry and of our whole society is much more solid than that of our opponents...
...Face to face in the Russian Prime Minister's press conferences were the democratic philosophies of the 17th and 18th centuries and the dictatorial thinking of Marx, Lenin and Stalin...
...It is, perhaps, just as safe to believe in vulgar Marxism as in the speed and beauty of Cadillacs...
...I wonder how many old Socialists or former Communists smiled as I did at this naive piece of exposition...
...But what has happened to him through the power of the Soviets is one of the strangest things which has ever taken place in this world...
...The earlier system had been dictatorial...
...Perhaps, in the long sessions at Camp David, Nikita imparted this learning to the President of the United States...
...For old Nikita came here as a pedagogue...
...It doesn't make any difference what people want...
...The democratic Socialists, the Mensheviks, were either executed or driven out...
...But still, the questions which I wanted put were never asked...
...First you have one sort of society, then you have another...
...Inventions will be made...
...He look for granted that he knew all about history and economics and that his listeners were simple-minded, uneducated peasants...
...But time marched on...
...To anyone who can make any sort of picture of the flow of human development over the wide world and through the long ages, Khrushchev's simplified history takes on the quality of a comic cartoon...
...Everything goes according to rule...
...In some respects we are false to our democratic doctrines...
...When his interrogators asked him why he is so confident that the Communists would bury the capitalists, he undertook a simple and painstaking explanation of his faith...
...Nothing is left to chance...
...Feudalism came to an end and something called capitalism took its place...
...In the face of Russian opposition we have many advantages...
...Karl Marx has had a wide influence—some good, some bad...
...Our great weakness is a certain naive materialism...
Vol. 42 • October 1959 • No. 37
